Apparently, junior minister for digital economy Fluer Pellerin thinks that Apple shouldn’t have rejected AppGratis from the App Store last week. Her remarks to the French media make it clear that she feels the tech company isn’t behaving ethically in its dealings with AppGratis, a French startup, or others like it, calling the move “an issue of fairness,” and “extremely brutal.”

Not only that, but Pellerin feels that European regulators might want to think about taking action against Apple for the rejection.

Over the course of the last five years, there have been a lot of movies with the gimmick that they have been shot on the iPhone, but few have pulled it off as well as this incredibly scary little short film made by Clement Deneux for the 2011 Disposable Film Festival, a film festival dedicated to short films shot on smartphones and either pocketable cameras.

It’s called Les Ongles, or The Nails, and it would be a discredit to describe the plot in much detail, except to say it’s a found-footage-style short that takes place during a party in Paris in which one guest is compelled to quit a nasty habit. You’re going to want to watch this.

Unless you’ve spent a considerable amount of time in France, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve never seen the device pictured above. What you’re looking at is one of the predecessors to the internet, the Minitel. The Minitel was essentially a service offered in France that required a table-top box similar to the one above. Once connected, users could make purchases, check stock prices, chat with others, have a connected mailbox, and search the phone directory.

The service was finally retired only a few days ago, on June 30th, 2012, but some of the core innovations behind it, started all the way back in 1978, laid the path for what we know as the modern computer and internet service today.

The Minitel not only attracted the attention of millions of French users until the domination of the internet, it also drew the attention of Steve Jobs, who was inspired by the device.

Robin Williams popped up on the Ellen DeGeneres show the other day to talk about “the new future” that Siri offers, and as he is wont to do, he used it as an opportunity to break out an outrageous impression of Siri as a stereotypical, cheese-sniffing Frenchman, dripping with contempt for the American bourgeoise.